Carshalton Boys was officially opened in 1964 following a complete restructuring of the secondary school system in the local area. The history of the school however is much older than that. The images below give a more detailed history of the school’s origins, developments and major changes up to the present day.

History of Carshalton Boys Sports College

St. Helier Estate

Like most developments in the local area, the origins of Carshalton Boys Sports College can be traced back to the 1920s. In 1926 the London County Council agreed to build the St. Helier Estate. It was designed to be a community of 40,000 people; as a result 9,000 houses, sixty shops, seven pubs, two churches, one 2,000-seater cinema and one hospital were built between 1928 and 1936. The LCC also commissioned the building of eighteen schools, one of which to be constructed on Winchcombe Road.

Figure 1 The building of the St. Helier Estate was such a huge undertaking, a temporary railway was built to ferry supplies

The School Grounds

At first the schools of the estate were not given a name, but rather a number. The school built on Winchcombe Road became number 7 and was split into a mixed primary and a girls’ secondary school. The Ordnance Survey map from the 1930s shows the two schools built on the site of the current East and West blocks, although not joined by the central block which now houses reception and the Hall. The map also shows how the Muschamp site was farm land in the 1930s. The buildings remained unchanged until the Second World War when the school took a direct hit from a ‘High Explosive Night-Time German Bomb’ during the London Blitz.

Despite the current school being built in the 1930s, the only boys to have attended would have been infants, as the secondary school was all-girls. The nearest all-boys secondary school was Carshalton West Boys’ School which was on the site of the current Carshalton High School for Girls. It was not until July 1964 that it was decided to combine the Winchcombe Road schools into an all-boys secondary school and to make Carshalton West into an all-girls school.

Carshalton High School for Boys

Carshalton High School for Boys officially opened its doors to the first students in September 1964; however the reorganisation of schools in the Carshalton Urban District meant that there was no common uniform or school badge. The first Headmaster of the newly formed Carshalton High School for Boys was Harold ‘Pip’ Prosser. As the school began to establish itself, a new school emblem was created, based on the Carshalton Urban District logo of a white swan upon a battlement. The school also introduced a new uniform consisting of a black blazer (with the school badge), black trousers, and a black and yellow striped tie.

One of the main reasons for relocating the boys to the Winchcombe Road School was because of the large sports field. By the late 1960s the school finally removed the Second World War air raid shelter to make way for a full-size football pitch. The school soon became known for its competitive nature when it came to sport, although football was by far the most successful.

It was not just in sports, however, that the school led the way. Between 1981 and 1990 the ‘Cloth Cap Players’—Carshalton Boys Amateur Dramatic Society—were the successive winners of the highest award given at the Norbury and Thornton Heath Drama Festival. The 1980s also saw the first-ever gardening club launched in 1984, along with the first-ever breakfast club, in 1988.

The school continued to grow and in September 1990 the £2million sports hall was opened on the Muschamp site by the Lord Mayor of Sutton. Four years later the Science Block was opened by the then leader of the Liberal Democrats, Paddy Ashdown. The students and staff of the school decided to bury a time-capsule underneath the new block so as to give future generations an insight into what the school was like in the 1990s.

Figure 3: Members of the Cloth Cap Players before their performance of Oliver in 1980

Carshalton Boys Sports College

In 2001 the school’s third Headmaster, Gareth Bevan, retired and was replaced by Simon Barber. A new block opened in the school’s playground, named after the former head teacher. In 2003 the school underwent its biggest change since 1964, when it was renamed Carshalton Boys Sports College following the award of Sports College status by the Labour Government.

In 2010 the school underwent another major change by successfully applying to become an academy, taking both the school and the school grounds out of local government control for the first time in its history. The school continued to go from strength to strength as an academy and in November 2012 CBSC played host to the first Royal visit to the Borough since 1987, when the Prince of Wales visited the school.